Nasty Little F___ers-Kindle (16 page)

***

Moretz, Allen, Edison, and the tattered remains of Bock squatted in the brush about twenty yards away, biding their time. Allen wanted to barge into the clearing and shoot Colby with the pistol, but Moretz knew better. He’d seen Colby shoot with that rifle, and knew he and Allen would be dead long before they got close. They should wait, he argued, until an opportunity to take them by surprise presented itself.

Allen balked at the idea, but seemed reluctant to act on his own. Moretz thought it might have something to do with the fact that he, and not Allen, held the pistol. No matter, waiting was the smart thing to do, and if Allen didn’t like it he could charge right in and get cut down by Sarge’s rifle. Moretz would wait, and he was sure his patience would be rewarded.

He didn’t have to wait long. Soon after they caught up to Sarge and Janice he watched as Sarge removed the rifle from over his shoulder and handed it to her. He thought the bastard might be about to take a nap, and was surprised when he took to the tree, instead.

Of course
, he thought.
The cell phones. He’s trying to get elevation
. He chuckled. It was a good plan. One they should have thought of sooner. It might even work. Sarge could get to the top and call for help, and a helicopter would come pick them up.

But it also left Janice alone, with the only other gun for miles around. Moretz’s smile widened. Perfect! He looked back at Allen with a triumphant smile on his face. Allen nodded, then turned to examine something on the ground. Moretz didn’t bother to ask what it was. Probably some animal’s shit.

He turned back to the clearing just in time to see Sarge’s foot disappear in the branches. “Ok, he said. It’s time to move.”

As one, the four men started creeping toward Janice.

Chapter Twenty

Colby grabbed the next branch and hauled his body weight up, now happier than ever that he’d stayed in shape after leaving the military. He spent three hours at the gym every day except Sundays. The first hour he worked on cardio; jumping rope and running on a treadmill. The next two hours were all about weights. Resistance training to break down the muscles so they would heal stronger and larger. While not especially bulky – he’d eschewed the high-protein diet of true bodybuilders – Colby’s frame was well defined and deceptively strong, which showed in the easy way he hauled his 250-pound body up and over the branches on the pine.

He paused in his climbing and looked down, but could no longer see Janice. The ground was hidden from view by the branches and needles below him. Here and there he could see patches of earth, but not enough to tell if Janice still stood by the trunk or if she’d stepped away from it. He hoped she hadn’t. Putting her back to the tree would help her avoid being surprised, as the only way anyone could get to her was from behind, and Colby’d checked to make sure there were plenty of dried pine needles and twigs to make such an approach as noisy as possible.

Just the same, he had a vague sense of uneasiness, and he thought about her sitting there as a bear or another cougar approached. Would she be able to aim and fire in time? Against a bear, maybe. But a cougar? He wasn’t so sure. A big, flying cat is a hard target to lead, especially when you’re so fucking scared you feel like you’re going to piss yourself. He should know; he’d almost lost his bladder a while ago. But no way could he tell her that. Not only would it scare her, but she might think less of him than she already did.

He had a sudden urge to climb back down and make sure she was all right. But that would mean another fifteen minutes of climbing down, and then he’d just have to start over again.
You’re just being stupid,
he told himself.
Janice is fine. If she fired the rifle, you’d hear it for sure.

But still… he’d feel so much better about leaving her alone down there if he could just
see
her.

What if those grub-things attacked her? Bock might still be out there somewhere, and where the hell were Moretz and Allen, anyway? Dead, most likely. But what about Bock? Colby shot him once and the bastard came back, and the second time he shot him the body disappeared. Could Bock still be running around out there? Harper, too? For that matter, who’s to say Steinman wasn’t some grub-covered zombie rolling around the woods and looking for a meal?

No, leaving her down there alone was a mistake; there were just too many goddamn variables. Images of Desert Storm came, unbidden, to his mind. His men, following him into battle. Trusting him to get them out of anything that came their way. Following him right to their deaths. There were too many variables back then, too, but he hadn’t listened to his instincts. He stared through the moisture in his eyes – where the fuck did
that
come from? – as he recalled his certainty that he was about to earn his next stripe. Fuck the danger; the only thing he could see was his promotion. All he’d gotten instead was an Honorable Discharge, which was bought and paid for by the lives of eight men who’d been foolish enough to trust him.

“No,” he said to the tree branch, “Not this time.” He started to back down the trunk, timeframe be damned, when he spotted a patch of blue through a break in the branches. It looked like the color of Janice’s shirt. He stared at it and watched as it shifted a bit, and a patch of dirty blonde hair came into view.

Janice!
She’s fine
.

There, what did I tell you?
He thought,
your imagination is going to get the best of you yet, Colby.

Christ he was fucking jumpy! He shook his head as he realized he’d just nearly spooked himself out of his only chance at rescue. Janice’s too. Fuck! He needed a break. When he got out of the woods he was going to take a long trip to Maui. He reached up and grabbed the next branch, promising himself a mild sunburn and plenty of Piña Coladas as a reward for getting his ass out of there. A girl would be nice, too. Some sweet young thing from the islands. He pictured a dark-skinned girl in a grass skirt, then thought better of it. He was too old for shit like that. But maybe Janice would like to come.

“Nah,” he sighed to himself as he hauled his body upward. “Not a chance in hell.” It pained him to admit it, but that ship had sailed. Besides, Janice wasn’t the Hawaii type, anyway. She was more like the woman you took up north for a ski vacation, where the cold nights made couples sleep closer together. Too bad, though. She would have looked pretty damn good in a grass skirt.

***

Janice sat with her back to the tree, berating herself for the way she’d spoken to Colby. It wasn’t his fault Edison was dead, and how could she explain to him that she was stressed? Would he understand? Probably, but maybe not. She was just a botanist. A geeky, awkward girl who’d grown into an equally geeky woman. He’d been places where people shot at him on a regular basis. This was probably just a routine evacuation to him, business as usual. Meanwhile she was scared out of her mind. He must think she was some kind of helpless nitwit, and she hadn’t done anything to make him think otherwise. Worse, he probably thought she hated him after the way she yelled at him earlier. She moaned into her knees, wondering what she could say to make things better between them when he got back.

It wouldn’t bother her so much if she could stop thinking about him, even for a minute, but she couldn’t. The way his eyes seemed so distant, so sad. There was a world of hurt somewhere in his past, and even though he obviously thought he kept it locked away, it leaked out of him through the hollow depth in his eyes and the tightness of his lips. She longed to know what had happened to him. What secrets was he hiding? What was the reason for the hole in his heart? Could she fill it? Would he let her?

Then again, maybe she’d be better off
not
knowing.

A noise in the bushes twenty feet away caught her attention, and Janice raised the rifle toward it. The leaves moved and twitched, and she sighted along the barrel, pulling the notch and the post into alignment like her father taught her all those years ago, back when she was a tomboy and Daddy’s Little Girl all rolled into one. She thumbed off the safety and wrapped a sweat-slicked finger around the trigger. The cool metal felt good under her fingertip, solid and heavy; the power of life and death with a single, swift twitch. Then she waited, forcing her breath out slow and even.

She almost fired into the bush, but she didn’t know what was in there and she knew Colby (when did she stop calling him Sarge, anyway?) would hear the shot and come down from the tree as fast as he could. It would waste more time and she didn’t want to do that unless it was absolutely necessary. On top of that, she only had three rounds. Better to save them. So she watched the brush, her finger tense on the trigger. A steady, vibrant hum buzzed through her mind as she waited, counting her heartbeats aloud in an effort to keep them steady.

Then Moretz stumbled out of the bushes, his clothing torn and his skin bleeding from a dozen different scratches. He looked up at her and for a moment he just stood there with his mouth hanging open.

“J-Janice?” he asked. “Is that really you?”

“Oh, Geez, Moretz,” Janice said, lowering the rifle. “Thank God you’re all right.”

Moretz ambled toward her, favoring his right leg. Before he’d gone five steps he stumbled and fell face first into the dirt and dried pine needles.

Janice dropped the rifle, grabbed her canteen and First Aid kit, and ran to his side. She knelt beside him and held the canteen up to his lips. He took it and gulped water from the opening, smiling and thanking her between swallows.

“Don’t talk,” she said. “Just drink. My God, you must have been trailing us for miles. You should have said something. Shouted or…or…shit, Moretz, you’re lucky to be alive.”

He said nothing, just drank and nodded. Cripes, he was thirsty! She took a moment to study him, his tattered clothes, his bleeding cuts and scratches. His short brown hair stood out in every direction, and there were bloodstains on his khakis and shirt. Then she noticed something shiny tucked into the waistband of his pants. It was black and chrome, and looked like the handle of Colby’s Desert Eagle.

“Hey,” she said, “Where did you get—”

A bright flare of pain exploded on the back of her head, and her last sensation was that of soft pine needles and dried leaves against her cheek just before the world went dark.

Chapter Twenty-One

Colby couldn’t climb any higher. There were perhaps another twenty or thirty feet left to the top of the tree, but the branches this high up thinned to the point he no longer trusted them to support his weight. He couldn’t see the ground anymore, and had long since lost sight of Janice’s blue blouse, but he estimated he’d climbed about a hundred and twenty-five feet. Maybe a hundred and thirty. It wasn’t much, and he was still surrounded on all sides by trees, but it would have to do; it was this or nothing.

He wiped his hands on his shirt, trying to get rid of the sticky pine sap that seemed to be everywhere. Whenever he grabbed a new branch, he found another vein of the stuff, as though the tree knew in advance where he would grab and let loose another glob of the shit just to fuck with him.

His shirt did nothing to absorb the sap, and all he managed to do was smear it further on his hands and leave sticky patches on his shirt, too. As it was, his forearms were covered in dry pine needles and bits of bark, but he couldn’t do anything about it now. Maybe when he got back to the ground he’d see if there was a stream nearby. It wouldn’t get the sap off, but it would help. If not, then he’d just have to stay sticky for a while until he could take a shower.

God, a hot shower would be great!
he thought. At that moment, covered in sap and woodland debris, hoping for a lousy cell phone signal and trying not to think about all the bodies he’d left behind, a shower sounded like the closest he would ever get to Heaven. He imagine what the water would feel like as it rolled over his skin, taking all the grime and blood away and carrying it down the drain.

The fucking phone better work.

He dug it out of his pocket, an act made more difficult by the sap that tried its best to glue his hand to the fabric of his jeans. When he finally got it out, he flipped it open, and pressed the ON button.
Please, God, let this work.

The phone beeped and the screen lit up, scrolling through its boot images as it searched for a recognizable signal. Colby thought he’d piss himself while he waited for the screen to come on. All he needed was one lousy bar to make a call. Just one bar.

Then the phone beeped again and the background image came onto the screen. It was a photo he’d taken of Janice when she wasn’t looking. She stood underneath a birch wearing a light yellow top and denim shorts, talking to Bock. Her hair shone auburn in the patchy sunlight and her face flushed with health. It was a profile picture, but he could still make out her plump lips. With the bright green foliage serving as the perfect backdrop, Colby thought he’d never taken a better picture, and probably would never take another one half as good.

But as beautiful as the picture was, it paled in comparison to the two bars his phone showed for a signal. Two bars! He’d been hoping for just one, but two? He stared at those two little lines for half a minute, willing them not to go away. They didn’t, and he almost shouted in triumph as he dialed the phone. He knew the number to Anzer’s office by heart. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face when the phone started to ring.